What Moral Clarity Is - And Isn't
We’ve been reminded over the past few weeks reminders of how nothing in our age comes close to the moral depravity of Hamas. Except for the moral depravity of Putin.
What does a dictator look like? Even the New York Post, whose editorial choices might occasionally be questonable, gets it. Here’s a recent front page, responding to President Trump’s false accusation that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a dictator.
With all the deliberate obfuscation, moral equivocation and spineless acquiesence, a broad consensus is being formed in two areas that could be crucial in stabilizing the world and limiting extremist forces - including those in the White House. There is a coalescing moral clarity revolving around two basic assumptions:
Hamas is bad.
Putin is the worst.
If you believe, as I do, that there are objective standards to morality, even though it may be nuanced at times (the Talmud is filled with moral dilemmas) we need to press these two facts, relentlessly and without qualification or distraction. If we do, good things can happen, even in these perilous times.
But if we get stuck on peripherals, matters that may be important but are still peripheral, we go off track. Often the dis-track-tions are intentional, such as when someone tries to apply “context” to an unspeakable crime, attempting to justify it by expanding the historical perspective by a few centuries, or more.
Putin is about as close to pure evil as we can find in our world. Any consensus of opinion that includes both Rubert Murdoch and Bernie Sanders is one that we might classify as a position not only of consensus, but moral clarity. And Hamas is not far behind and is gaining fast.
For the purposes of this newsletter, I’ll focus on Hamas more than Russia. Suffice to say that if President Zelensky and the Europeans are able to tap dance around Trump’s ego to produce a durable and tolerable end game, then they are the ones who should walk away with the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump so covets. Despite the hopelessness America’s despicable diplomatic reversal has engendered among civilized people of the world, as demonstrated by the recent UN vote…
…the hope lies in the bald fact that it’s not fun to be isolated, and the US now stands at the side of a small group that features North Korea, Russia and Belarus (and shamefully, Israel, for the first time siding with Russia, most likely to mollify Trump).
The consensus supporting Ukraine, and the pushback following Trump’s appeasement, reinforces the moral clarity of Ukraine’s case. Of all the fires that the new administration has set, support for Ukraine is the one most likely to wedge some Congressional Republicans and their constiuents away from Trump, at least on this issue. We’ve seen it in the press, polling and in town halls. It remains to be seen, but moral clarity still provides significant weight.
Everything Trump is doing is important - deportations, firings, security breaches, executive branch takeovers, the price of eggs - but Russia-Ukraine is the issue of greatest consensus, the lowest hanging fruit. We need to pick that fruit, relentlessly, until the tree is bare.
Now, onto Hamas.
Today, the Bibas children1 and their mother were buried. and while the funeral was private, Israelis lined the route from the center of the country to their home, where the funeral took place.2
Nothing since October 7 itself has highlighted so clearly the moral depravity of Hamas as their behavior over the past few weeks in the treatment of these and other hostages, both dead and alive.
The discovery by Israeli forensic experts that the two Bibas children, whom Hamas claimed were killed by Israeli airstrikes, were in fact murdered “in cold blood by their captors’ bare hands,” followed by the revelation that the mother’s body had been switched with the corpse of an unidentified woman, was too much for the civilized world to bear. It was so craven, in fact, that Hamas has accomplished what no one could achieve until now - they silenced some of their own international support. Even the U.N Secretary General criticized - without equivocation - the ‘abhorrent and appalling’ treatment of hostages’ remains by Hamas. We still await more statements of outrage, but that’s a good start.3
While a solid argument can be made that Israel insufficently met its humanitarian obligations in Gaza - and investigations will determine whether there were war crimes - what Hamas did on October 7 was so bad, and Hamas so craven, as to dwarf nearly all comparisons to horrific, indiscriminate acts of war, from Dresden to Aleppo to the destruction of Gaza itself. Israelis await a full accounting of where the army and government failed to protect innocent lives on both sides of the border, and the sooner the better.
But nothing comes close to the depravity of Hamas, whose killing has never been indiscriminate. The civilians, including their own, are the target. The terror is the objective, the ends, not merely the means. The humiliation of human beings is, for some, a shameful aberration - as it was at Abu Ghraib prison. For Hamas, the humiliation (including that of non-Jews like Hisham Al-Sayed, who had been a captive since he wandered into Gaza ten years ago and suffered from mental illness4) is the point.
As Times of Israel reports, “hostages have been paraded on stages surrounded by heavily armed masked gunmen, given “release certificates” and “gift bags,” and made to wave crowds of civilians brought in to watch the spectacle and thank their captors.”
Any humiliation will do, the more craven the better.
Yair Rosenberg of the Atlantic sums up the most recent “macabre” human rights debacle as “perverse performance art.” which involved the switching of a dead hostage’s body for someone unknown. He adds:
The truth is, body switching might be new to this conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day Hamas invaded southern Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including uploading the execution of a grandmother to her Facebook page—the group has been staging a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of Palestinian nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college students than residents of Gaza—Hamas has attempted to win a perverse propaganda war even as it has lost the actual war in lopsided fashion, to the horrific devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.
Some of these efforts are only now coming to light. In January, the 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa was released from captivity in one of the first exchanges under the current cease-fire deal. She revealed that she had been forced by her Hamas jailers to stage her own demise. “Today we are filming you dead,” one reportedly told her, compelling her to pose in powder and debris as though she’d been killed in an Israeli air strike. Hamas subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa’s tattoo. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group that joined Hamas in its October 7 assault, similarly falsely claimed that the 76-year-old hostage Hanna Katzir had died, only to release her in a November 2023 exchange.
The parading of hostages on display like livestock angered the Trump adminstration. Imagine, an administration that is routinely bullying the weak and defenseless, itself being appalled by the bullying of the weak and defenseless. What Hamas is doing must be really bad - so bad that, according to Times of Israel, these staged handovers pushed the Americans over the line in now demanding the expulsion of Hamas leadership from Gaza in negotiations over the next phase of the peace plan.
And yes, the initial Trump plan for Gaza is also morally repugnant, but only inasmuch as it does not discriminate between Gazans in general and Hamas in particular. Indiscriminate ethnic cleansing of an entire population is indefensible, but eviction of indiscriminate murderers whose platform is genocide is not. Because of Hamas’s own behavior, their expulsion is sliding into the realm of the possible and the Palestinian movement is beginning to slide away from their grasp, both on the grass roots level and among Arab leaders. A consensus is growing that recognizes that the evil perpretrated by Hamas stands alone and cannot be defended.
Plus there is growing recognition among Gazans themselves that they have been Hamas’s most victimized hostages.
See: Analysis | No, All Palestinians Don't Back Hamas' Depravity. And All Israelis Don't Back Ben-Gvir's Bloodthirsty Vengeance (Ha’aretz)
With no sign of war ending, Gazans increasingly disenchanted with Hamas (Al-Monitor)
Rage in Gaza isn’t directed only at Israel. Some are angry with Hamas too (LA Times)
Hamas’s desperate, sickening attempt to stay relevant with these hostage exchanges has unmasked who they are and what they really want. If Ukraine is the low-hanging fruit of the American resistance to Trump, Hamas has become the low-hanging fruit of the next phase of Gaza’s reconstruction.
We need to acknowledge that and begin to grow a consensus of moral clarity regarding Hamas that can acknowledge the fears, pain and victimization of Israelis and Palestinians alike, and enable them to begin setting site on a more secure future devoid both of extremism and extremists. Hamas needs to be expelled from this conflict, having sabotaged it so many times.5 We must relegate their torture, their bus bombings, their cold-blooded, bare hands murders, their indiscriminate rockets, to the dustbin of history.
But of course, nothing in the Middle East is so simple, and Hamas will not go gently into that good night. We can only pray that there will be a light at the end of this dark terror-tunnel.
So now I want to clarify what I mean when I talk about clarity.
What is Moral Clarity?
The Three Paragraph Rule
Moral clarity, a term made popular in conservative circles, gained a bipartisan flavor when it came from the mouth of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she won her race in 2018. “I think what we’ve seen is that working-class Americans want a clear champion,” she said, “and there is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.”
The New York Times put it this way at the time:
Moral clarity is long defined by usage as a capacity to make firm, unflinching distinctions between evil and good, and to take action based on those distinctions. These are fighting words: They mean knowing the enemy, which is the first step to taking up arms against the enemy. But they’re potentially applicable to any side of a fight. What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to — and maybe a pretext for — combat.
For me, moral clarity does not come in a rush, like adrenaline, and is not designed to prepare the field for battle and enemy for dehumanization.
Moral clarity needs to be borne of intellectual clarity, not a war footing or heavy dose of propaganda. While it often will involve an enemy - as it does with Hamas - the case against that group needs to be intellectually self-evident, so clear as to be beyond reasonable doubt.
In practice, moral clarity is expressed in the Three Paragraph Rule.
What is that?
A couple of weeks following the pogrom of October 7, an open letter went around from a progressive rabbinic group that I have long supported. I often sign their petitions, including ones both strongly critical and strongly supportive of the Israeli government. Hundreds - literally hundreds - of respected rabbinic and cantorial colleagues signed on to this letter. l decided not to sign. It was a lonely feeling to stay on the sidelines.
Nothing there was in itself objectionable to me, but the sum of the parts did not do justice to the enormity and uniqueness of what happened on Oct 7. At that time, I decided, it was crucial to maintain moral clarity, which demanded, in my mind, that the genocidal crimes of Oct 7 receive three paragraphs of attention for every sentence devoted to other concerns. When looking at that Jewish clergy letter from late October, 2023, I didn't feel, for instance, that the proper imbalance was being expressed between what Hamas did on October 7 and lots of legitimate concerns about Israeli far-right abuses, particularly on the West Bank, and potential war crimes in Gaza. But that was for another letter, I felt, and if it were inserted in this letter, the three paragraph rule had to hold. It did not, so I didn’t sign.
Moral Clarity (without Blinders) vs. Moral Purity (with Blinders)
Still, despite the Three Paragraph Rule, I need to emphasize the following:
Moral clarity does not require blinders on other issues - including a genuine compassion for the plight of innocent Palestinians. Speaking as a rabbi to my own people, a Jew should never wear moral blinders, especially at times of war. Speaking as a human being, no one should.
There is a distinction that needs to be made between moral clarity, where the evil is self evident and verifiable, flowing from the facts; and moral purity, where the narrative reigns supreme, even if it means massaging the facts to support it. There can be, in fact, several simultaneous moral clarities - something moral purity can't sustain. Moral purity applies blinders to competing visions in order to reinforce one’s own case. It shuts down press coverage from the other side. What we’ve seen from Hamas does not need embellishment and it stands up to attempts at refutation. It does not require, for example, “proof” that Gazans overwhelmingly support Hamas, which would justify excessive retribution and ultimately could be used as a pretext for ethnic cleansing. Despite the crowds that we’ve seen supporting Hamas at hostage release ceremonies (who may have been forced to demonstrate), the truth is far less clear.6
Click here for my packet on Morality, Judaism and Warfare, to see how the Torah is clear about moral clarity. And click on the footnote to see basic principles of “purity of arms” in the code of the IDF 7
It's infuriating to see the hypocrisy of those who count on the world’s short attention span to willfully forget, distort and deny what Hamas did. But that just makes it more crucial that we calmly focus on reminding people, again and again, about what happened on October 7. That’s what I’m doing right now. No need for excessive cynicism or fury, neither of which will remove Hamas from the picture.
See Human Rights Watch: “I Can’t Erase All the Blood from My Mind” Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault on Israel”
See ADL: Denial and Distortion of the Hamas-led October 7 Attack: An Overview of False Narratives
We need to methodically ritualize memory of what Hamas has done, to show the videos and text messages, play those final phone messages, pray at the vigils, call out the names of the hostages. We need to maintain our focus on addressing the horrible things that happened so that the remaining hostages may return safely and those living in Israel's southern communities can rebuild their lives in safety and peace. Everything else is secondary. The fury is not helpful.
Moral clarity needs to be focused, empathetic, measured and nimble, able to address multiple injustices simultaneously and distinguish between those provocations that are more chronic and a "once in a thousand year storm." It doesn’t apply to every crime. If the concept is diluted, it loses meaning.
At the same time, let me tell you what moral clarity is not: tribal. Your "team" is due some extra consideration when individual lives are at stake, but we can't allow tribal affiliations to cloud our judgment, even when it seems like everyone else is piling onto the bandwagon of peoplehood. There are reasons why ending Hamas’s rule is a moral choice, but none are because they picked on “our” people. Had they pulled an October 7 on Rwandan Tutsis, Cambodians or Armenians, or for that matter, the Dakota tribes of the U.S., the evil would be just as morally clear, the act equally repugnant, and the obligation to defeat them equally compelling.
As Rabbi David Wolpe wrote in the journal Sapir:
...The rabbis say that one who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind (Tanhuma, Parshat Metzora). They remind us that allowing cruel people to pursue their designs in this world will ultimately lead to innocents running, terrified and helpless, as evil men shoot them in the back, kill their children, and rape the women. It will lead to October 7. The great philosopher Maimonides, having fled from Almohad persecution in Spain in the 12th century, put it more comprehensively. “Compassion toward the wicked,” he said, “is cruelty toward all beings.” (Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part 3, Chapter 39)
So moral clarity is a product of the reasoning mind, not unbridled passions. We need to present ourselves with an array of options and constantly challenge and update our choices. A socratic dialogue must constantly be going on in our minds, and if the result comes out more Churchill than Tevye, we know that the case for clarity is compelling.
It has never been more compelling in my lifetime, and arguably since World War Two, than it is now.
And so, as best I can summarize it, that's what it means to speak with moral clarity, as we engage in dialogue with our neighbors, our families, and within ourselves. We don't need talking points, all we need is truth. Leave your propaganda at the door.
Hamas has ceded the right to rule - or even live - in Gaza. Once they are gone, lots of good things could happen for Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Europeans; for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Druze and Zoroastrians; for farmers and venture capitalists, students and professors at Columbia and Liberty universities.
Hamas, the ones who destroyed umpteen roadmaps for peace for over three decades - who blew up buses in 1995 and probably were behind some more bus (fortunately empty) explosions just last week, whose cold-blooded murder of the beautiful children Ariel and Kfir Bibas draws echoes to their cold-blooded killing of two Israeli soldiers twenty five years ago (with bloodied hands proudly waved - photo below) and brings Hamas’s ignominy full circle.
Well, they’ve just given us the roadmap for getting rid of them.
See Times of Israel: Palestinian infamous for 2000 lynching of soldiers in Ramallah killed in Gaza strike 8
We need to be prepared to make the morally-clear case for removing Hamas from power and their leadership from Gaza. They have ceded their right to run a country.
You know who else has? Vladimir Putin. And any nation with just a tiny hint of a moral spine would understand that and would never have supported Russia in this week’s shameful UN vote.9
Eulogy, transcript and photos from Y-net of the funeral
"Mi amor,
I remember the first time I called you Mi Amor. It was early in our relationship, and you told me to call you that only if I was absolutely sure I loved you—not to say it lightly.
So, I didn’t say it right away because I didn’t want you to think I was rushing to say I love you. But Shiri, I’ll tell you now—I already loved you then when I first said Mi Amor.
Shiri, I love you, and I will always love you!
Shiri, you are everything to me!
You are the best wife and mother,
Shiri, you are my best friend.
Mishmish, who will help me make decisions now? How am I supposed to make decisions without you?
Do you remember our last decision?
In the shelter, I asked you, Do we fight or surrender? You said, We fight, so I fought.
Shiri, I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. If only I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have fired a shot.
I think about everything we shared, and there are so many good memories.
I remember the births of Ariel and Kfir. I remember the days we would sit at home or in a café, just the two of us, talking about everything. It was so much fun—I miss that, and I miss you so much.
Your presence is deeply missed.
I want to tell you about everything happening in the world and here in Israel.
Shiri, everyone knows us and loves us—you wouldn’t believe how surreal this madness is.
Shiri, people tell me they will always be by my side, but they are not you. So please, stay close to me and don’t go far.
Shiri, this is the closest I’ve been to you since October 7, and I can’t kiss or hug you—that breaks me.
Shiri, please watch over me…
Protect me from bad decisions. Protect me from harm. Protect me from myself. Protect me so I don’t sink into darkness.
Mishmish, I love you!
Chuki,
You made me a father. You made us a family.
You taught me what really matters in life and what responsibility means.
The day you were born, I grew up in an instant because of you. You taught me so much about myself, and I want to say thank you.
(Photo: Courtesy of the family)
So, thank you, my love.
Ariel, I hope you are not angry at me for not being able to protect you properly, for not being there for you. I hope you know that I thought about you every single day, every single minute.
I hope you are enjoying yourself in heaven. I’m sure you’re making all the angels laugh with your jokes and impressions. I hope there are lots of butterflies for you to watch, just like you did on our picnics.
(Photo: Courtesy of the family)
Chuki, be careful when you come down from your cloud—don’t step on Tony…
Teach Kfir all your impressions, and make everyone laugh up there.
Ariel, I love you the most in the world, always in the world—just like you used to say to us.
Pupik,
I never thought our family could be any more perfect—and then you came along and made it even more perfect.
(Photo: Courtesy of the family)
I remember your birth. I remember that in the middle of labor, the midwife suddenly stopped, and we panicked—we were afraid something was wrong. But it was just so she could tell us that we had another redhead. Mom and I laughed and cheered.
You brought even more light and happiness into our little home. You came with your sweet, infectious laughter, and I was hooked instantly!
It was impossible not to snuggle you all the time.
Kfir, I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better, but I need you to know that I love you so much, and I miss you terribly!
I miss holding you close and hearing your giggles.
I miss our morning playtime when Mom would ask me to watch you before I left for work. I loved those little moments so much, and I miss them now more than ever.
Kfir, I love you the most in the world, always in the world!
I have so much more to tell you, but I will keep it for when we are alone."
As Dara Horn has written, people love dead Jews.
See A decade of ‘unimaginable suffering:’ Relief as Avera Mengistu, Hisham al-Sayed freed (Times of Israel) Hostage Hisham Al-Sayed, then 28, entered Gaza near the Erez Crossing in April 2015. According to his father, that was not his first visit to the Strip. He was in captivity for 3,596 days…. al-Sayed suffered from mental illness, though he briefly served in the military before being discharged. Al-Sayed was not heard from until 2022, when Hamas released a video showing him looking sick and depleted in a bed and hooked up to an oxygen tank.
Al-Sayed’s father Sha’ban al-Sayed told Kan radio that he was shocked by the poor mental and physical state of his son following his release, adding that Hisham was “destroyed, emotionally and cognitively.”
“His mental condition is in a bad state, he doesn’t communicate, and he looks like he was in a torture camp for 10 years,” said Sha’ban al-Sayed. “We didn’t think to ourselves that Hamas would be so cruel.”
Here’s a chart of Hamas’s terror attacks just in the post-Oslo period from 1993-2005.
A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) indicates a growing shift in public opinion in Gaza and the West Bank regarding Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The survey, conducted September 3-7, 2024, found that 57% of respondents in Gaza now consider the attack to have been the wrong decision, a significant drop in support since previous polls. In the West Bank, 64% of respondents still back the decision, though this also represents a decline in approval. (TheMediaLine, Sept 18)
Principles of Warfare from the IDF
Times of Israel from last October:
How has America sunk so low as to back Russia in this war? Click to see the full text of the UN resolution
